Spinning rust, something we might know hard drives by, has seem some advancements. Seagate announce a while back ago about 10GB HDD (http://www.pcworld.com/article/3096292/storage/seagates-10tb-barracuda-pro-is-the-worlds-largest-consumer-hard-drive.html). Their drive doesn’t use helium to reduce drag (more drag = more power used). Now, if their are some helium based HDDs that run cool and lower power and high storage capacities, but still not as much at 10GB, OK they come close! Now I remember in the past about using a come table salt in HDDs )(https://www.wired.com/2011/10/hard-drive-space-salt/). What if they combined them, and also gave them four independent arms to give ~4x more performance?

Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom T-Labs and the Technical University of Munich have announced that they have been able to achieve 1 terabit per second speeds over fiber in “real-world conditions”. To achieve this, they are using a modulation system called Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS).

“PCS modifies the probability with which constellation points, the alphabet of the transmission, are used. Traditionally, all constellation points are used with the same frequency. PCS cleverly uses constellation points with high amplitude less frequently than those with lesser amplitude to transmit signals that, on average, are more resilient to noise and other impairments. This allows the transmission rate to be tailored to ideally fit the transmission channel, delivering up to 30 percent greater reach.”

Digging deeper into several articles, it seem that 1 Tbps is the max, since one test showed 0.8 Tbps, which was on a link over 600 KM away. There wasn’t any details on if the 600 KM link was one continuous run, or if there were repeaters involved. We will have to wait and see if this ends up being adopted in commercial products.

I thought I would come back to the blogging world and post all the neat things I find that doesn’t fit what most of the people linked to me are interested in. I’ll be tweaking the site over the next couple weeks, so there might not be many posts.